To All My Huckleberry Friends
by sideofahill
Summary: Chuck/Blair through 2.15. "She tugged his shirttails off a ledge and into her arms, his whispered sorry falling through the air like a tear stained handkerchief dropped at the funeral of someone who wasn’t quite dead yet ."


**Disclaimer: I own nothing but my mistakes.**

**Also, comments are complete and utter love.**

In ninth grade Mrs. Hardgrove made them read _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_. Chuck was impressed.

"I'd like to attend my own funeral," he later told Blair. "I think I'd enjoy watching you cry into Nate's shoulder on my behalf."

"Dream on, Bass," she said, rolling her eyes. "You know that Nate would be the one in tears."

She remembers this conversation later, when he hosts his homecoming party at Victrola. It had been perilously close to becoming a farewell party, before she tugged his shirttails off a ledge and into her arms, his whispered _sorry_ falling through the air like a tear stained handkerchief dropped at the funeral of someone who wasn't quite dead (yet).

She sat next to him on the limo ride home, reaching up ever so often to fix his tousled hair, painting a glossy white over his bright red scars in the hopes that she could trick him into doing the rest of the job.

"The next time you decide to throw yourself a suicide party, Chuck, I expect two weeks notice and a monogrammed invitation."

She steals his handkerchief when he isn't looking (it's purple, of course), and cries all the way home. She's (not) surprised to find that she does in fact cry when Chuck Bass throws himself fake funerals.

*

She gets waitlisted from Yale three weeks later. The first thing she does is find that handkerchief, which she had buried in her bureau drawer beneath a pair of black la perlas. She takes a sick day from school and watches Breakfast at Tiffany's on a loop, crying into _his _purple handkerchief over a pint of rocky road with a vodka chaser.

After Audrey's fifth rendition of _Moon River_ and a bit too much alcohol, Blair starts to wonder what a huckleberry friend is. She decides that they're the people who don't have funerals: the people who get lost at sea without ever making it onto the cover of the New York Times.

By that point Serena has called 7 times and has sent 12 text messages, and Blair can't help but resent the beautiful blond friend who could float for miles without ever getting lost; who has a lifeguard on speed dial (filed under the letter B) for whenever the current was threatening to pull her under. She doesn't want to hear about how Serena is going to go to Yale and become the shiniest Meryl that ever Streeped, so she hits the ignore button every time, willing the world to just let her drift off to sea for a day (or three).

But then the Gossip Girl blast comes, and not only did Serena get in; she's bringing her Brooklyn boyfriend with her to the hallowed halls of Blair's once upon a future.

So Blair dabs at her eyes with her purple handkerchief (which still smells of scotch, no matter how many times she's had Dorota run it through the laundry). She decides that the standards of Yale have obviously lowered, and she whips out the course catalogue for Columbia.

She's heard they have a good poli sci program.

Yet in the back of her head, in the place that wishes she was the drifter being saved instead of the perpetual lifeguard, she thinks that just once it would've been nice if _she_ had been the one to get the monogrammed invitation.

*

He shows up the next day with a bouquet of white roses.

She almost smiles.

"Flowers? Again?"

"I'm nothing if not persistent," he says, almost smiling himself.

He pulls one flower out of the bouquet and runs it through her dark curls, painting over her pain with bright white in the hopes that he could trick her into letting him do some of the job.

After he leaves she puts the flowers in a vase on her nightstand. She finds a card nestled between the thorns.

Blair,

Know that I'll hold your hand, if you need me to.

Love,

Chuck

And for a moment, she thinks that might be all the invitation that she needs.


End file.
